ProTools

Productivity Tools, better known as ProTools, is Carlson Software’s machine guidance performance analysis product. Your process and equipment performance can be monitored and analyzed to gain advantage over your competitors. ProTools aides in optimizing equipment performance by providing remote viewing of real-time or historic information for all of your earthmoving equipment. Full 3-D playback provides valuable insight into how the numbers were generated for the user-defined reports, which allow for tracking any aspect, including push lengths and slopes, rehandle, and volumes per hour.

Combined with Telescope, real-time display of location, volumes, and other priceless statistics are made available to the office. Supported machine guidance products include: Carlson’s AutoGrade and Leica’s Dozer2000.

Productivity Tools is the main program used to calculate volumes of material moved. The volumes are calculated from any start time to any end time in the database, and for any or all rovers. The radio-linked position data from the heavy equipment is analyzed to determine production rates. Productivity Tools may operate on an “as-needed” basis, or in an automatic mode. Combined with Telescope, location and volumes are displayed in real-time.

Productivity Tools feature real-time remote viewing and full 3D playback of earthmoving equipment. In addition, user-defined reports on any aspect including push lengths and slopes, rehandle and volumes per hour are included in the arsenal. Furthermore, ProTools permits report packages to be created, and presented in formats suiting different departments. This means that executives can have information, such as a summary of production reports, at their fingertips.

Moreover, operator actions can be assessed to bring all operators’ performance to the same level. ProTools is a software package that aides in “best practice” evaluations. One company used Productivity Tools to analyze if a straight push or a fan push was more productive and also looked at what length of push was most productive. This led to optimized practices, which meant a more lucrative bottom line.

Main Screen

In the ProTools main screen, the plan view is displayed on the left with vehicle tracking displayed in varying colors. Each color represents a different activity time block. So, the purple and blue indicate different periods of work.

The right side contains the legend of colors and allows the user to toggle periods (off/on) from the visibility box above the colored bar. So, if only a certain shift for the day was of interest, all of the other items could be turned off to clearly see the period of interest. The QuickLoad button at the lower right allows the user to connect to rover units through Carlson Telescope to get updated information.

Volume Factors

In addition, a grid building activity must be set in this screen before work can begin. The activities can be customized by typing each one in the memo field at the bottom of the screen.

Replay Screen

A unique feature of Productivity Tools is that a series of events can be watched in real-time or historic information can be replayed in the sequence that it actually occurred. As the animation is taking place, the location of the vehicle moves on the map, the cut/fill bars change appropriately on the right, and the report at the bottom of the screen is populated.

The series of events can be paused, slowed, or speeded, depending on what the user is trying to view. Some of the items being reported include: percentage of time system on, idle time, cut yards, fill yards, number of pushes, average push length, and cumulative push and travel lengths. All of these categories are available for analysis for the following breakdowns: on the left: by hour; and on the right: for the last half hour, hour, shift, week, and month.

The following is a special graph, which shows the elevation change over time for the heavy equipment. It informs at quick glance what level the vehicle might have been working on for the day or the progress that was made.

Profile Screen

The ProTools profile screen aides in determining optimum push trajectories. The vehicle is displayed in plan view on the left with the red line indicating the profile section. The cut/fill bars are displayed on the right with the other controls, and the profile view is show on the bottom of the screen.

The blue line on the profile indicates the current position of the vehicle on the section. Red indicates the places that were cut and the green the places that were filled on the pass. This feature is helpful when evaluating operator performance during “best-practice” selection.

Report Screen

User-defined reports on any aspect including push lengths and slopes, rehandle and volumes per hour are included in the ProTools arsenal. Any element of data can be expressed as a factor of another for the chart at the screen bottom.

Productivity Tools permits report packages to be created and presented in formats suiting different departments.

The graph above displays productivity versus the time of day. This operation tended to get much better production during daylight hours than at night.

Below is a chart of End Slope and Productivity over time. As the job progressed, the end slope decreased, and productivity increased. This information was used to start changing procedures which were monitored and fine-tuned until they saw production rise by 40%.